Isambard-class Support Carrier
Designed by an independent think tank and later refined by Halifax Spacewerx, the ''Isambard-c''lass Support Carrier saw a radical change in ship design philosophy from nearly every angle. Borrowing design elements from the company's earlier produced Phoenix-class Colony Ships, the odd vessel was produced at the end of Operation: TREBUCHET in 2523 and primarily saw combat in the Human-Covenant war starting only a few years later. Primary among the ship's bizarre features in the startling dearth of weaponry, most of the ship replaced with a labyrinthine collection of manufacturing equipment designed to produce everything from Longswords to Scorpions, given the right materials. The ship's main focus, however, was producing swarms of M777i Sai Drones capable of blocking entire barrages of plasma torpedoes and annihilating targets with a hail of kamikaze attacks with varying payloads. This was assisted by the extensive use of dumb AI traditionally used with heavy industry coordinated by a leading smart AI. Given the ship's adaptability and unique abilities, it proved a mainstay in nearly every UNSC fleet it was stationed in. Whether used as a purely support vessel, producing vehicles for ground support, as a close quarters slugger spearheading attacks, or as a command vessel and carrier in the back of the action, the vessel proved its unorthodox design to be one of the most effective for its time in the 26th century. External Design The Isambard-class's unorthodox design doesn't appear to carry over to its exterior at first glance, though upon closer inspection, there are massive, glaring differences between it and traditional UNSC ships. Perhaps largest among these differences is the complete lack of a dedicated primary MAC gun. While the ship could have conceivably mounted two SMACs given its size, it doesn't have one at all. Between the power draw, space constraints, and refire time, a primary MAC was ditched altogether. The ship, however, is armed with eighteen separate M2488 Onagers, ten of which are heavily modified and locked in a fixed position. The modified Onagers, larger and wider than their counterparts, are used as slingshot accelerators for launching M777i Sai Drones from the ship at extraordinary velocities. They can also be used to fire ordinary slugs, though they are rarely used for the purpose. Continuing in the same vein of external armaments, the ships have an overabundance of archer missiles, far beyond what would ordinarily be considered reasonable. Even further, the ship has no missile pods of any other type, notably absent being the Shiva-class, whose warheads, along with other nuclear devices such as HAVOK and Fury nuclear devices, are strapped to a Sai Drone instead. The number of archer missiles is intended to function as point defense, as well as eviscerate any vessel in range with its shields down. The ship, additionally, features a completely internal bridge, located in the central aft sections of the vessel. Information is provided completely through sensors located on the exterior of the vessel. Additional information can be acquired by fitting the ship's Sai Drones with sensors to augment and enhance its view of the battlefield. Also of note is the unusually thick armor for a vessel of its purpose. While most carriers are relatively lightly armored in order to keep up with smaller vessels, the Isambard-''class carries armor comparable to most cruisers, allowing it to soak up far more punishment than would normally be possible. Tying to the extra armor is the presence of an overwhelming number of fusion drives aboard the ship. With the millions of extra tons in armor and equipment and cargo crammed into the ship, it is fixed with an absolutely ludicrous number of thrusters in order to allow it to keep pace with much smaller vessels despite its heavy load. All cannot be active at once during combat, however, as the manufacturing, Onagers, and other systems draw too much power for the ships reactors to handle, leaving unable to power all eleven primary engines and practically much slower in combat without sacrificing power to other systems. More traditionally, the ship is equipped with four externally mounted D20 Herons, used for transporting large quantities of materials to the ship beyond what can be provided by pelicans. Hangars, of which ten exist aboard a vessel, each carry a group of pelicans, broadswords and longswords, distributed evenly to prevent a single damaged hangar from destroying all of a particular type of vessel. Internal Design The inside of the ''Isambard-class also represent a massive departure from traditional schools of thought regarding internal ship design. Between the presence of mass amounts of heavy machinery, the lack of an integrated MAC cannon into the superstructure, and the requirement of many reactors, quite a number of unusual design features are seen. Redundancy was a key feature during design, as well as overall decentralization. Reactors, storage, weapons, hangars and manufacturing are distributed in clusters throughout the ship, usually in groups, to minimize the amount of damage any one attack could inflict to the vessel. Ten clusters is the norm for a vessel, and the ship is capable of functioning with as few as a single cluster online. With the lack of a MAC gun and the decentralized nature of the vessel, the internal structure of the ship has been significantly strengthened, with everything from interior walls to major structural elements far thicker and stronger than would be normal for a ship. Even if the ship's already generous exterior armor is penetrated, there is no guarantee that the attack will be able to damage the vessel in any noteworthy capacity. Despite the class's size, it has an unusually small crew, owing to the sheer quantity of automation aboard the vessel. Because of this, as well as the size constraints on the inside of the vessel with all of the other features, space became a premium. The designers, however, attempted to turn this into an advantage. The narrow hallways and labyrinthine interior allow even just a token force of defenders to hold off a much larger force with little difficulty. With added interior defenses such as reinforced bulkhead doors and automated machine gun turrets, the process of boarding the vessel and disabling it from the interior is a long and arduous one. Armaments The Isambard-class has a number of unique weapon choices that set it apart from mainline ships aside from its lack of a primary weapon and its M777i Sai Drones. Each fulfills a unique niche to help the ship cover holes left by other aspects of its design. The ship features eight M2488 Onager MACs. Without a primary MAC cannon, they are the main workhorse for line in terms of ship-to-ship combat. While they lack the raw punching power to down the shields of something like a covenant cruiser, they make up for it with numbers, allowing them to deal with nearby threats with relative ease. The ten modified Onager MACs, designated M2488i, are equipped aboard the ship. Each is locked in a fixed position and set back into the hull, rendering them incapable of aiming to acquire a target, but also difficult to damage. Compared to normal M2488 Onagers, they are wider, designed to handle larger payloads, and faster charging, although lower power overall. Their main job is to launch M777i Sai Drones at rapid speed from the ship, eliminating the need for them to accelerate away from the ship and allow them to gain speed, at which point their maneuverability will prevent them from getting shot down. In practice, they function similarly to electromagnetic aircraft launch systems used on aircraft carriers in the twentieth century and onward. Though it requires a bit of luck for the shots to line up, M2488i's can also be used for ship-to-ship combat, where they function about as well as their ordinary counterparts. Also noteworthy is the sheer number of Archer missile pods aboard the ship. They occupy nearly every area that doesn't need to be protected critically by armor. Not only do they allow the ship to smother craft in missiles once their shields are downed by MAC guns or drones armed with a nuclear payload, they are excellent for point defense. With the sheer quantity of missiles aboard the ship, it makes it nearly impossible for any nearby attack craft to dodge, and given their frequently light armor, it is inevitable they'll be shredded even if they're hit by merely a tenth of the missiles launched. Given the ship's weakness to boarding craft, missiles are an important crutch for the Isambard-class. Foundries and Manufacturing The ship's most notably aspect is its on-board manufacturing equipment. A militarized and up-scaled version of the production lines found aboard colony ships such as the Phoenix-class vessels, the foundries aboard the Isambard-''class were designed for speed and adaptability. Ten foundries exist aboard each vessel, and are completely automated by industrial dumb AI and managed by a smart AI. These foundries are fed by warehouse sized storage rooms containing a variety of materials from electronics to armor plating to explosives. The standard production rate for M777i Sai Drones is approximately ten per minute, one per foundry. Said drones are stored in a small bay capable of holding fifty at a time to await deployment via Onager-launcher. Additional Sai Drones can be back-filled into the foundry storage, but are not immediately available for combat. Changing the production from M777i Sai Drones to anything else can take upwards of several hours or as little as ten minutes, depending on the desired production. Something like armor plating for repairs takes very little time, where as attempting to produce an M808 Scorpion from scratch takes much longer. The foundries are unable to produce an item which they do not have the raw materials to create, of course, meaning that non-standard materials or anything requiring proprietary parts often means the equipment needs to be modified if it can be produced at all. The foundries are often derided for their low production quality, prioritizing speed of production over quality control. While all items produced are serviceable, they are overall more unreliable and less polished than their professionally manufactured counterparts. An M12 Warthog, for example, might have worse suspension and poorer brakes and handling. Overall, however, most consider having a poor quality Warthog better than not having one at all. M777i Sai Drone Designed to be as highly adaptable and quick and cheap to produce as possible, the M777i Sai Drone produced by the Isambard-class are small, but not be underestimated. The basic construction of the M777i Sai Drone is fairly simple. In essence, they're little more than an shipboard emergency thruster modified to allow for a slow burn with armor plates strapped atop it. A universal hardpoint is attached to allow for the drones to carry a multitude of different payloads. Some are armed with nothing, and used merely for kamikaze attacks and screening, while others are fitted with EMP modules or nuclear warheads. A set of transmitters allow for the drones to be controlled by its command vessel, usually by the shipboard AI. M777i Sai Drones have a limited amount of flight time, usually around thirty minutes of active movement before they run out of fuel. Their ratio of size-to-thrust also allows for them to hit quite extreme speeds, allowing them to keep up with and intercept missiles and other fast moving objects. The armor plating on the M777i Sai Drone is for protecting from space dust and debris more than anything else, which at the speeds they move, could rip the drone to shreds otherwise. Plasma fire from nearly anything, including sustained small arms, is capable of melting through and rupturing the explosive fuel fairly easily. Their speed and sheer numbers and replacement rate, however, are generally considered enough to compensate. The M777i Sai Drone are often used for defense, with one of their best uses being intercepting incoming plasma torpedoes, breaking them up before they hit their intended targets. Of course, this results in the destruction of the drone, but most captains consider the loss of a disposable drone better than a direct hit. M777i Sai Drone can be fitted with EMP modules to further disrupt plasma torpedoes, but such drones are used almost exclusively for point defense. M777i Sai Drone can be used offensively as well, either hitting small targets such as phantoms and seraphs or, equipped with nukes, bringing down much larger vessels. Often, their small size and great speed can allow them to slip through the shields in the wake of outgoing fire and ships, and detonate the nuke inside the shields of a covenant ship. Even without a nuke or other payload, launched from a fully charged Onager, the drone can be devastating upon a direct impact with another vessel. Drone Variants 1: Sensor packages continue to function even after the drone's fuel has burned out. Criticisms While the vessel largely performs admirably, it has come under fire for a myriad of different things, something largely expected given its unorthodox design. Firstly, the ship's M777i Sai Drone. While it is undeniable that they are effective and have opened a new door in space combat, they also have their issues. The M777i Sai Drones are disposable, something that is a double edged sword. While cheap and easy to produce, the costs of continually producing drones can add up as they aren't recoverable. The cost of materials to arm the ship's foundries is exorbitant over the course of a campaign, though it's partially offset by the unusually low crew costs for a ship of its size. Additionally, the M777i Sai Drones are very fragile, weaker than even the lightest armored manned craft. Relying on numbers to overwhelm an opponent, if the drone's numbers are whittled down, they are almost a non-factor. The UNSC Static Worry fell victim to this issue, it's foundries unable to replace the M777i Sai Drone as they fell, and covenant forces eventually pushed them back to the point of destroying drones as soon as they were launched. Without a main MAC gun or Shiva-class missiles to fall back on, the ship was forced to rely on its relatively weak Onagers and archer missiles to defend itself and was eventually destroyed. Lastly, the M777i Sai Drones rely on communication with the main vessel and their lightly shielded electronics to function. Significant enough electromagnetic interference, the downing of all shipboard control equipment, or a significant enough cyberattack can all disable drones completely and render the ship toothless. Second among the criticisms of the ship is its extremely light defense force. While the internal layout of the ship was designed to aid the defenders as much as possible, at the end of the day, it doesn't compensate completely. Though the ship is hard to board due to the inordinate amount of point defense, it remains a glaring weakness, if hard to exploit. Though not a criticism of the ship's combat potential, the ship's heavy reliance on AI makes it an intelligence vulnerability. During the Human-Covenant war, the concern of the shipboard AI being captured and mined for intel was a major concern. Though the dumb AI don't contain such information and were strictly isolated from the more delicate databanks, their exploitation remained a major concern. The software and information were as just as much value to the covenant as destroying the ship itself, if not more so. Additionally, the ship's power consumption was also criticized. Unable to run all of its systems at once, power consumption had to be critically considered during combat. Power to Onagers, foundries, thrusters, life support, communications and computers all have to be carefully balanced. Generally, the thrusters receive the short end of the stick, rendering the vessel much slower in combat, though given its nature as a carrier, it generally is able to compensate with a long engagement range. Furthermore, the ship's size is problematic in several regards. It is unable to leave a planet's surface unassisted. Given its extreme weight, it is difficult to dock planetside and launch again, which can be an issue if repairs are required, though it is mitigated to some degree given that the ship can self-repair easily. It also has difficulty maneuvering. While it can reach fair speeds quickly, it's maneuvering thrusters are sub par, leaving it relying on point defense and emergency thrusters to prevent attacks from landing. Additionally, the line has come under fire for its reputation for reliance on nuclear weaponry, something not entirely unwarranted. The M777i-N1 Sai Drones are used with little discretion, though use of the N2 and N3 variants are far less common. The ship has also taken flak for its relatively narrow scope. Most capital ships have many more options available to them, particularly when it comes to ground assaults or other operations. As it stands, the Isambard-class is unable to prove itself useful outside of space combat unless it has a fleet it can support and produce materiel for. Ships of the Line Trivia * Names of the ships are taken or inspired by songs and albums from Maryland-based rock group Clutch. *